Wednesday, August 27, 2014

When he was a boy, Viktor Mandelbrot’s mother worked in a small factory polishing brass fittings. Her fingertips were permanently gray from handling the fittings each day, her fingerprints all but worn smooth. In my next career, I’ll be a burglar, she would sometimes joke in the thick old-world accent that Mandelbrot did not share. And young Mandelbrot would secretly delight in the thought of fantastic adventures, he and his mother stealing through the night in black clothing and stocking caps, potato sacks of loot slung over their shoulders, avoiding the coppers and ransoming hostages. This was, of course, outrageous even to imagine. His mother once punished him for pocketing a grocery store cherry. She had made him apologize and barred him from cherries for a month.

The factory was housed within a turn of the century brick building alongside the slow Housatonic. Even then the river was filthy. In the overcast light it expressed a polluted opalescence. Its varying depth seemed the defy any system of prognostication, being not influenced by the tides alone, but also by the seemingly arbitrary operations of the hydroelectric dam floodgates ten miles to the north, which themselves were often influence by the weather further north still. From its headwaters in Northwestern Massachusetts down into Connecticut, it traced the New York state line, flowed past countless factories and plants that imbued the waters with their chemical effluence and organic wastes, so that when it spilled itself into Long Island Sound, south of the factory, the so-called waters were little more than a flimsy liquid matrix, a filthy solution pushed to the limits of molecular saturation.

Once as a boy, Mandelbrot had accompanied his mother to work, and though she sat him in an old uneven side-chair with a storybook and told him not to stray, he wandered through the factory, away from the churning, growling engine lathes and milling machines, down dusty dark-pitched stairwells of hand-hewn planks and beams to strange storerooms and places filled with weird contraptions of heavily painted iron, the uses of which his young mind could not decipher. Along the back wall of one wide room were many windows, covered thick with grime and dust, and against them he could hear a periodic rapping, irregular in measure and frequency. Closer, he saw an undulating line across each window, the glass divided in two values, the lighter grey quivering above darker brown. He stared, placed his hand against the dirty pane, felt the cold rhythm pulse against his palm.

In a corner was an old stool and he brought it to the window, stood upon it to reach the tarnished brass latch, then pushed hard until the mechanism turned. He pushed the stool to one side with his leg and grabbed the wide brass grips at the window’s low bottom rail, hoisted, and the brown water flowed in. It rushed cold past his bare calves, filled his shoes, and coursed across the dust caked floorboards. He tried to close it, but he did not have the strength. He thought of running, but instead stood there, water pouring in around him, like some stupefied and ineffectual version of the Dutch boy. The water was past his waist when the men came tromping down the stairs. They ran through the water toward him. One lifted him up, trudged back to the stairs with Mandelbrot in his elbow like a floppy violin case. The other man went for the window, and Mandelbrot watched dazed as the man lowered the sash, shut it with one quick push. Then all was quiet, save the muted sound of the upstairs machines which kept running. The man placed Mandelbrot on the steps, and the two adults stood looking at one another, hands at hips and forehead, in quiet disbelief. He could hear their flushed breathing, the soft burble of the water around their rocking calves.

He figured he was a goner. His mother would be fired and he would be sent to some orphanage. But those things did not happen. Instead they were sent home early. Mandelbrot was bathed, fed soup, then sent to bed early. His mother said nothing, and Mandelbrot was certainly not going to bring it up. After that, he was never again asked to accompany his mother to work.

Not long after that, the man who had shut the window began escorting Mandelbrot’s mother home after work. His name was Mr. Novak; he was the plant manager, and sometimes he would stay for diner. And as time went on, he would be there until Mandelbrot was put to bed, and sometimes he was there in the morning when Mandelbrot awoke, in the same clothes he had on the night before appearing to have never left.

It became usual that for one week each summer, Mandelbrot and his mother would go with Mr. Novak to his camp in the Catskills. Mr. Novak was himself a Polish immigrant. As time went on, Mandelbrot got the sense that he looked out for Mrs. Mandelbrot, as Novak called her. Years later, when he thought about things through the eyes of an adult, Mandelbrot assumed that Novak had planned on making Mrs. Mandelbrot his wife.

Novak was old country, a well groomed, neatly dressed man with a clean-shaven face like a lungfish. His thin blonde hair was always combed flat against his red scalp, and though his suits were not the expensive type, they were always in good repair and well pressed. He spoke to Mrs. Mandelbrot in Polish mostly, and was, Mandelbrot later concluded, somewhere in the area of fifteen years her senior. He was never short-tempered or ill mannered, nor was he warm or kind. His manner toward Mrs. Mandelbrot was stoic and businesslike, not exactly the way a manager might act toward an employee, but similar, perhaps the way a banker might interact with a person seeking a loan: congenial, distant, and slightly skeptical.

Still there was something vaguely fatherly about the man, though Mandelbrot could not be sure of that having only witnessed such things secondhand. During the times they spent in the Catskills, Novak acted as if the Mandelbrots were his own wife and child. He drove them everywhere in his clean, though aging, Sedan. He paid for their meals and activities, took Mandelbrot to pony rides and paddled them across the lake in a canoe. Even then, the sight of Novak in sleeve garters, sweating as he paddled the full canoe beneath the hot sun was almost too much. Even as they sat atop the red and white-checkered picnic blanket, eating fruits and cheeses in a buttercup field in the shade of an old gnarled oak, Novak possessed a professional detachment. Even when he rolled up his shirtsleeves, he did not convey an air of getting down to business like a man preparing to invest some elbow grease, he just looked like he was about to do his taxes.

Often, in the long sticky afternoons, Mrs. Mandelbrot would send her son away.

“Viktor,” she would say, perhaps leaning against the jamb of his bedroom door, one arm against her waist, the elbow of the other resting upon its wrist, fingers holding a cigarette just beyond her lips. “Go into the woods and explore. Exercise your legs. Why not take Mr. Novak’s gun and hunt squirrels or little birds. What ever you like. But don’t come back before lunch time.”

He would go into the woods, Novak’s old bird rifle slung over his shoulder, and imagine himself an Indian, hunting the great bear, the whitetail, the pheasant. He killed squirrels, sparrows and mourning doves. He would bury their carcasses, perform improvised Indian burial rites.

Once, deep in the woods, he knelt above the grave of a thrush he had tracked into the wood’s interior. He killed with a single shot to the skull as it dug for grubs among the litter. He dug, first through the rust-colored blanket of pine needles, then the fertile black loam, with his fingers, whispered brother bird you died so my people might live as he plowed the earth and shoots above its lifeless form. He fashioned a cross out of twigs, he had seen this in movies, and realized then that he had never wandered this far in before. Even as he called out to the Great Spirit on the dead bird’s behalf, he ignored the nagging fear that he was hopelessly lost and would not be able to find his way back to Novak’s camp before dark.

He watched a red-tailed hawk spiral slowly above the valley, watching for prey, patient as the hills. A smaller hawk trailed, beating its wings fiercely to keep up as its mother rode the currents with her wide wings, not flapping once, just hanging there spinning like a feather at the surface of a little river eddy.

Mandelbrot checked the sun’s position. It was sinking faster now; soon it would be twilight. The threat of wolves was real. All week, and the summers before, he had heard them calling their tribal songs from the hills in the night as he lay beneath thin cotton sheets, bathed in the white light of the bright rural moon. There were mountain lions too, and black bears, and those could climb trees if they wanted and he did not doubt that his soft pink body would motivate them to do so. He did not like the sound of spending the night in the woods. He slung the rifle over his shoulder. Said one last blessing above the buried thrush.

At first, he did not think it strange to see the man standing there, at the hill’s crest, looking toward him, but in an instant the incongruity of it manifested and his blood froze. Suddenly it appeared to him that though the man was looking in his direction, he could not see Mandelbrot. It was though he was looking through the boy, over the hillside and across the valley, toward the barley visible pond that lay secreted among the trees in the valley among the hills.

The man was shirtless, dressed like a television Indian. He wore buckskin leggings and moccasins. His hair was cut short at the top, and at the back ran down his neck to fan over his shoulders. His skin was the color of pine needles, his cheeks and chest marked with white and red clay. The boy watched the man for a moment, became somehow unafraid. He raised his hand but the man made no acknowledgement. He just stood there staring into the wilderness. It was as if Mandelbrot had found his way into some motel room painting, or slid somehow into an ancient moment long passed.

In a strange instant, an improbable emotion overcame the boy. He became overwhelmed with the notion that the man was his father, whom he had never met. He raised his palm to the man, and the man turned away from him, moving like a somnambulist, took a step and disappeared above the crest beyond Mandelbrot’s line of sight.

He felt something like a punch to the ribs, ran wildly up the hillside, the rifle slipped from his elbow, bounced crazily on its strap that hung from his elbow. He sought to catch the man, to grab him, face him, make him see him there, shout you are my father! I am the son you never knew and I have found you! At the crest, his foot caught a stone, and it sent him flying to his belly. He slid for feet across the floor litter, down the opposite slope, wind knocked from his lungs. He struggled to get up, but he could not see through the tears. All that was visible was the vague shrinking shape of the man’s form as it moved down the hill, until it disappeared amidst the trees.

He sat there for a moment, wiped his eyes on his wrists, picked sediment and needles from the scrapes on his knees. He stood up, brushed debris from his body, picked up the rifle from where it had fallen, then without a thought took off across the forest. He ran without thinking, as fast as he could. The sun was already dipping below the western ridge. He was going in the correct general direction, he knew that at least, but soon the moss laden roof of the cottage peeked between the trees and he fell into the yard like a ballplayer sliding for home. He imagined a wolf at his back, its slobbering maw snapping at his heels just as he leapt from its reach beyond the boundaries of its woodland realm. Safe. He saw glowing eyes in the shadows, among the tree trunks, heard disgusted growls from beastly throats. “Better luck next time,” he said then spit, slapping his hands together repeatedly in a that’s that movement.

He dropped the rifle beside the back steps and entered the cottage. He was thirsty and his legs stung in the spots he had skinned them. In the back porch he found his mother sitting in an Adirondack chair, looking through the wire screen toward the place along the hills where the sun had set. A cigarette languished between her fingers, slowly burning to the long ash that hung precariously from its tip. There was the tinny music of the wireless radio, piano and nearly inaudible guitar strumming, deep bass plunking, and the sad soulful sound of a deep female voice singing something in another language. It wasn’t Polish, he knew that, but what language it was, he had no way of knowing.

“Mom,” he said, but she did not appear to hear him. She did not look toward him. Her gaze stayed fixed on the hills. There were a few candles lit in the cottage, and some stray rays of blazing red sunlight, and these sources filled the rooms with a flickering mystical ambience.

He approached her, placed his small soiled hand on her arm. “Mom?” He spoke again.

She turned slowly to him and smiled a slow pulpy smile. Her eyebrows did not move.

“Hello, kochanie,” she said, swiped a palm across his dirt coated forehead, touched his cheek soft with smooth gray fingertips.

She was still a young woman then, not much older than thirty. Her flesh was pale and soft, but on her forehead and beside her eyes and lips thin creases had already formed. She was dewy with sweat, and the candlelight played upon her damp skin, made her glisten as if coated in fine crystal dust of sugar or quartz. Her hair was pulled back in a sloppy thoughtless bun. The two top buttons of her summer dress were unbuttoned and her eyelids looked sleepy and heavy. She smelled of alcohol and something else and her breath near his face was like smoke and skim milk.

“I saw an Indian,” he said, and she smiled.

“Did you?” She said. The smile dissolved and her eyes moved back out the window. “Did you shoot him with your gun?”

“No,” he said. He took the cigarette from her fingers, flicked the ashes into a candle, then placed the still lit butt between his own pursed lips and inhaled a little. He plucked it from his lips with his thumb and forefinger to speak.

“I think he was a ghost. It was deep in the woods and I tried to chase him but I fell and skinned my knees. When I got up he was gone. Disappeared.”

She didn’t respond, swiped gently at his hair with the back of her fingers making tiny circles with the backs of her knuckles. She leaned back in the seat and closed her eyes.

Mandelbrot watched as his mother drifted quietly to sleep. He turned on the old ceiling fan and placed a knitted afghan up over her shoulders. In her sleep she settled in to it, nuzzled her cheek against the needlework.

He did not find Mr. Novak anywhere in the cottage. He poured himself a glass of lemonade from the icebox, then went and sat on the back porch and smoked his mother’s cigarettes as phantom bats flitted past his head and yellow-green fireflies drifted by in the starry darkness. The candlelight cast flickering shadows across the lawn before him until it went out from the fan or was suffocated by its own tallow. The little blue lights of all the Universe slowly spun overhead and the red cherry of the cigarette pulsated in the darkness between his face and his fingers.

That night beside the open unscreened window, he drifted to sleep. And as the waking world turned to dreams, he saw a string of fireflies float weaving across his bed to hang at his ceiling like stars. In his slumber he dreamed of the Housatonic, its cold clean waters bursting the dam to rise ever deeper beside the factory walls until the building was submerged. The windows dissolved like sugar and the waters flowed in, sinking the machinery, sending little brass parts to the purified floor. Then he saw his mother floating peaceful in the clear blue water. Her pure white fingertips were rutted and furrowed and her face was not.

Image:
Henry, Eugene P. “A Maine fishing Village.” 1922. Web. August 27, 2014.
<http://www.hellenicaworld.com/USA/Photography/en/PictorialPhotographyAmerica1922.html>In the winter rain they stood upon some strange wooden pilings,
sodden waterlogged beams, remnants of some out-of-use edifice, but
neither seemed to know what its use had been.Two walls of wood, slats affixed to wide pilings and foot by foot
cross beams. The whole thing was fitted with wide hex-bolts with
threads displayed naked where the water and accumulated sand of tides
and tides had forced the wooden pieces apart. With each wave that
sloughed up through the roughly twelve-foot wide space that separated
the walls, the wooden beams hulked and shook, the one-inch bolts
wrenched out of their stripped shafts and snapped back sharply as the
waves fell past. The whole thing shuddered.It must have been some type of levee, designed to direct the flow of
brackish water out from the estuary marshland and down into the bay, a
way to minimize beach erosion. But the geology of the beach must have
changed much since the walls were built, which was clearly many decades
past, for the estuary’s flow was little more than a dribbling trickle
which died half way down the beach never reaching the spot where the
walls began.Or perhaps there had been a road. Yards away, to the Northwest,
there were signs that a portion of what was now the beach had once been
paved, for here and there broken bits of old asphalt jutted up from the
sand. And rusted lengths of pipe stuck up among the rocks at the base of
the rock cliff suggesting antiquated plumbing.Nathan walked out first, foot before foot, with a jaunty, almost
cartoonish, confidence which seemed, to Berry, inappropriate given the
strong wind that blew across the pilings sidewise and the white capped
sloshing waves that lapped the wood from all sides and at times broke
inches above the topmost planks’ surfaces.The wind was warm, given the setting, but the bay’s water was icy
cold. Berry sneered at the water as it smacked against the sides of
Nathan’s black canvass sneakers. He heart skipped a beat when the kid’s
worn soul failed to find purchase with one step and his whole body
tottered before landing the next step. But Nathan hadn’t even seemed to
notice. Halfway down the structure, Berry’s glasses were so
covered with rain and salt his visibility was less than if he wore no
glasses at all so he removed them. Stuck them into the waistband of his
tighty-whities. Suddenly everything became like a wash of thinned ink. A
gradient of grey that moved and morphed as if dragged across paper by
the unseen brush of god.Berry felt his face growing red with … was it anger? Anger for whom?
For this kid, Nathan? For the elements? For himself? It smoldered hot
beneath the red of chill on flabby fat cheeks.He could not scorn the sea. It was what it was, and he guessed he
respected its climatic barbarity. But he found himself, now, filled
with a bubbling rage for the slight boyish frame which moved across the
wooden pilings before him, and the oblivious something-like-grace with
which it moved despite the grossly obvious danger surrounding it.As if on cue, it spoke: “Don’t worry, dude! The water’s so high, if
we fall in we can just pull ourselves back up.” A pause. “Unless there’s
some crazy undertow, which there no doubt is.”Berry sniffled hard; a booger shot up into his sinuses. That morning:Berry awoke to the sound of water slamming against his room window.
It was the ocean. During the night a winter squall had moved in from
the sea. Berry sat up in his bed, rubbed his eyes, and the back of his
neck. Yesterday, he hadn’t closed the window’s curtains, and now the
diffuse grey light of stormy Maine filled the room. Rhythms pulsed
around him. The cyclic undulation of rain on the roof and window was an
offbeat to the pounding of the surf against the outer wall of Berry’s
room. He got out of his bed and walked to the window. He looked out
through the slosh and clamor of the breaking waves and across the
turbulence. Through the rain and the waves, Berry could make out a few
brightly painted fishing boats, tethered to posts, and pitching
uncontrollably in the ocean’s billows. For a moment he got the strange
sense that the waves were like the arms of the ocean, and they were
reaching out for him. He imagined what it would be like, if the waves
were to knock out the wooden pilings which bore the weight of the
B&B. If he and his whole room were sent crashing down into the
breaking waves. A small fat man and his suitcase, in which were the few
remaining things he owned, the entirety of a whole life, set spiraling
down to the water and the rocks to be tossed and smashed to nothing.He put on his pants, and his shoes, and his black turtleneck sweater.
He grabbed a small black satchel off the floor next to the bureau and
went downstairs.Berry had hoped that Nathan would be around when he got downstairs,
but he wasn’t. He had hoped Nathan might let him borrow his jacket. He
thought about going up to Nathan’s room and knocking on the door to see
if he was in, but he decided against it. Instead he went into the
dining room, poured himself a cup of coffee, sat down in a chair, and
waited.He sat at the same table he’d sat at yesterday. He sat in the same
chair. The inn seemed empty, again. Not even the man behind the desk
(was he an innkeeper?) was around. Berry didn’t suppose that anyone
besides Nathan and himself were staying there. It was deep winter in
Vacationland. It was summer someplace else. He sat and sipped his
coffee. Slowly the realization fell that Berry had a slight hangover,
and that he didn’t know what time it was and he allowed his mind to shut
off. He became part of the room, motionless, breathing, in existential
syncopation with the waves and the rain and the seagulls who barked,
somehow still gliding on the hellacious winds.Soon Berry heard the inn’s front door open. Sodden footsteps sounded
on the lobby’s hardwood floor. Nathan appeared from around the corner,
his jacket hood pulled up over his head. He was dripping with rain.“Berry,” said Nathan smiling.“Hey,” Berry responded.“It’s pretty fucking wicked out there today.” “Yeah.”“Listen, I came to get you. You said you were looking for a job on a boat, right?”“I don’t think I said that.” Said Berry, pulling himself up from a slouch.“Sure you did. Last night at the pub. You said you felt lost. Like
you had never done anything real. I said you should get a job on a
boat.”“Oh.” Berry said, embarrassed, confused.Well, I
was talking to this guy at the docks, and he said he might have a job
for you. We’re going to meet him at the pub tonite after dinner. But
first we need to teach you how to fish!”“Okay,” said Berry. He placed his belongings into his bag and walked
toward Nathan. He expected Nathan to move, to turn around, head out
toward the front door. But he just stood there, and by the time Berry
stopped, he and Nathan were standing right in front of one another.
Berry hadn’t noticed before, how short Nathan was. Berry was only about
five ten, and Nathan appeared to be at least three inches shorter.
Nathan was chuckling. “Berry, you need a jacket,” he said. Berry didn’t say anything. He did need a jacket.“I’ve got an idea,” said Nathan. “Hold on a second.” He moved
passed Berry, across the dining room and through a pair of swinging
double doors Berry guessed lead into the kitchen. Berry heard what
sounded like cabinet doors opening and closing. In a moment Nathan
returned, dragging behind him a gigantic black garbage bag.“Here,” he said, thrusting it in Berry’s direction. “Put a hole in it for your face.”On the pier:“I think we should just go back,” Berry shouted to Nathan who now was
more than halfway down the total length of the structure, just feet away
from where it sank completely beneath the surface of the tide.“No way, Berry! Don’t be a chicken. This is fun!” The shape shouted
back, giving no verbal sign of alarm when, for a moment, it again almost
lost its footing.Berry felt his body tense, almost diving forward into the water
before the blur regained its foothold on the wood. In a second the
tension passed, and Berry became immediately relaxed. In a moment, his
fear for Nathan had tamed his rage, transformed anger into courage; and
when that too had passed, he realized that he himself had been standing
upon the shaky wet wooden prop for minutes. He tightened his grip on
the fishing pole he was carrying, and stepped forward, following Nathan
out into the crashing waves.Nathan was squatting, cutting off chunks of mackerel against the planks between his sneakers.“If a boat goes by, we’re fucked!” Nathan screamed, laughing.“Gimme your pole,” he said to Berry as he baited his own hook.Berry took a few uncertain steps forward, stretching his arm out
toward Nathan. Nathan grabbed the fishing pole, beneath the top loop,
and Berry let go. The pole splashed down into the waves, submerging the
reel and bottom half of the pole. Nathan pulled it up from the water,
quickly stuck a hunk of fish on the hook.“Att’ll do ya,” he said, handing the poll back to Berry. Too far now
to reach the pole without being speared by the dangling hook, Berry
took a few more steps forward.“Watch out,” Nathan said throwing back his pole.“Okay,” Berry replied, flinching a bit, unsure of what exactly was about to happen.Then he watched in awe as Nathan cast his line off into the surf.
The purity of motion was amazing and beautiful. Nathan had never
impressed Berry as being particularly graceful. His movements, though
deliberate, had always seemed more purposeful than elegant, impelled
more by youthful rawness, than some sort of refined physical dexterity.But this was something different. Berry was amazed to behold muscle
memory in action. And his brain was flooded with molecules of shame. It
was as if he’d been placed before some large fourth-dimensional mirror,
and for what was surprisingly the first time in his life, Berry
realized just how entirely physically awkward he was.There was nothing he did as automatically as Nathan had cast that
line. Not shoveling food into his fat face, not scribbling notes to
himself on stolen office post-its, not fucking, not riding a bike, not
wiping his ass after a neat little shit. Berry was incapable of grace
even through the most redundant practice. He was capable of mechanical
mindless action, but even that was sloppy and unsure.“Aren’t you going to cast?” Nathan shouted over the wind, as a large swell billowed over the piling and halfway up his calf.“Yeah,” said Berry. “I guess so. I’m not sure I know how.”“You’re just going to have to figure it out,” said Nathan amidst the tumult.Berry wrapped his chubby pink fingers around the line just above the
reel, pulling it back against the rod. Then, as he’d seen Nathan do
moments before, he flicked the metal arc at the top of the reel with his
thumb. The wind blew hard, and fishing line began to fly off the reel,
beneath where he held it with his fingers. He panicked, snapped the
pole back over his shoulder then flung it forward. When the pole was
pitched 90 degrees he let the line loose with his fingers, sending the
bated hook flying out with the wind. The gust took mackerel and carried
it out so far Berry thought he might lose sight of it. Finally it
splashed down to the waves with a whirl.“That was a good cast!” Nathan shouted. “I thought you said you’ve never fished before.”Berry just smiled, rainwater and sea spray flowing down his fat dumb
face like cum down the faces of Asian girls in the bukkake films he
watched.“Keep casting on this side,” Nathan shouted. “If you cast in the
other direction, you might get tangled up on the other wall. If a fish
swims around the pilings, you’re fucked. I’ll keep casting out to the
front, here. That way, our lines shouldn’t get tangled.”“Alright,” Berry yelled back, not completely sure he understood what
it was Nathan was talking about. A wave swelled up above his toes,
filling his loafers with cold saltwater.The rain was picking up now, and the sea was spraying something
wicked. Small steady streams of brackish water were flowing hardcore off
Berry’s garbage bag poncho. He was standing sideways upon the
structure, water before him, wind at his back. The rotting wood beneath
his soles was soaking up water like a sponge, and the thin green layer
of grassy algae was growing slicker from compaction and inundation.
Berry willfully slid his right foot side to side a bit, and a stupid
bloated smile spread across his doughy pink cheeks.He looked to his right, through the gauzy haze of water that had run
down his brow and filled his eyes, toward the end of the plank where
Nathan stood. He was just a rain soaked blur, like an out of focus
photograph. A soundtrack of windy discord, the crashing and swelling of
seawater surrounded him, filling his ears and mind like a superb rising
ebb tide.All at once he was alive. The wind beat his back harder. Raindrops
smacked against his face and cheeks so hard it stung. And soon, Berry
couldn’t tell if he wasn’t crying. He laughed, and his laughter was
awkward and whooping, forced yet uncontrollable like the unchained
sobbing of a grown man thrust into miserable hysteria. And soon, he felt
he couldn’t stop himself, and he wasn’t even sure if he hadn’t lost it.Through clenched and watery eyes he saw Nathan’s form turn toward him. He heard him shouting.“Berry! Your line! You’ve got a bite!”Berry looked in front of himself. The rod he was holding had arced down drastically, bent almost 180 degrees.“Fuck! Nathan! What do I do?” He shouted in a panic.“Set the hook! Jerk back the rod!”He did it, staggering.“Now what?”“Reel it in!”Berry pulled the rod hard against his paunch. The base stuck in his gut, and he cranked the reel in a frenzy.He was turning the reel with all his might, forcing the pole’s handle
deep into his belly until it hurt. Still, he felt he was making little
progress. Berry felt as if he were attempting to ride uphill on a bike
stuck in the highest gear gear. He turned and turned.“God!” Nathan shouted, “This thing must be huge!”Berry’s fingers felt like ice-cold jelly, and just when he felt he
could turn the reel no more, the fish’s head broke the surface of a
cresting wave which crashed down upon the levee all around Berry.The head was huge, with a threatening boney jaw, and shining golden
eyes. The horrible face was still burning in Berry’s mind when the
waves closed in above his head.Suddenly, everything was a muffled soundlessness, and murky obscure
brown-grey light. There was no up nor down and everything was drowsy
weightlessness and cold. Berry felt the garbage bag swelling up all
around him, he saw vague shadows of ghastly gigantic fish suspended all
around him. And then, suddenly, he could see them. A school. A dozen or
so gigantic fish, hovering almost motionlessly, twelve-foot a piece,
with strange pointed snouts and prehistoric boney plates down their
backs and sides. In the murky light they seemed to glow gold, or ghost
white and he could feel them watching him. Like old gods. Like something
beyond the experience of man. Like silent acceptance.He suddenly felt very tired. He felt as if he was already asleep,
and at once everything became just a dream. This was not his life.He saw himself, from a camera angle outside of his own body. There
he was, sitting behind his desk, in his office at Head Over Advertising,
back in Filler. It was springtime, and all the cartoon frog-green
leaves of old maple trees were shimming with sunlight, dancing in the
warm Connecticut breeze.He was there in short sleeves; his old blue and green striped tie
tied snug around his fat well-fed neck. Little specks of dust and airy
flotsam drifted past the yellow square of window sunlight. And all he
could hear was the quiet hummy buzz of the perpetual fluorescent
lighting.Even the old faux-wood paneling upon the office walls seemed bright
and welcoming. Every spilled-coffee carpet stain was gladly received.
He was home again, but now everything had changed. What he had called
monotony, was security. What he had perceived to be boredom was
protection, shelter.That was his life. Routine is refuge; and he had torn that refuge to
bits, cast his haven into the cold Atlantic where is would sink and
sink, only to be buried in all the silt of a hellish abyss.It was a moment before he felt the smacks on his face. He could see
Nathan’s face, flushed and drenched and teary shouting before he heard
the screams. He was back upon the levee, eyes open staring up from a
pale expressionless face. Nathan was kneeling on his groin. He puched
Berry hard in the sternum with a audible crack.“Berry!” Nathan’s voice shouted. “Berry, please!” “Fuck Berry! Please!“Somebody help!” Nathan screamed so loud it seemed blood would pour
out from his throat. And the Berry coughed. He hacked and felt the
sting of saltwater spurt out from his lungs. He swore he felt a little
fish wriggle out over his tongue.“Berry! Jesus, Fuck!” Nathan cried. “Jesus Christ, Berry! Fuck!”Berry clenched his fat cheeks with fingertips. Jolted up. Tossed Nathan back on his ass to the structure. He stood.“Nathan! God damn it! You almost killed me! I almost died!”Nathan got up on his feet ran to Berry, grabbed his face and pulled it down to his and locked his gaze.“But Berry! You’re alive!”

Tuesday, August 19, 2014

"Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear." —R. W. Emerson

The romantic friendship that Walt Whitman shared with Peter Doyle embodied the "love of comrades" celebrated in Whitman's "Calamus" poems. Their thirty-year friendship (1865–1892) left a legacy of loving letters from the older man to his younger companion ...

Doyle and Whitman met one winter's evening in Washington, D.C. The twenty-one-year-old Doyle was the conductor on a Pennsylvania Avenue horsecar, and the forty-five-year-old Whitman was the car's sole passenger. Doyle recalled, "We were familiar at once—I put my hand on his knee—we understood . . . From that time on, we were the biggest sort of friends" (qtd. in Bucke 23).

While traditionally treated as a discipline with processes set apart from the scholarly, the field of creative writing, in actuality, presents the unique opportunity to apply many concepts of both scholarly and creative techniques in a single unified process. Creative writing and scholarly analysis of texts represent two sides of a single coin, the two ends of one process. The writer writes so his words may be analyzed. That analysis may be performed casually by a non-scholarly reader, in terms of craft by a fellow creative writer, or academically by a scholar. The possibilities for various types of reading and analysis are probably endless, as each is personal to the individual. That said, there are certain absolutes inherent to the processes of textual creation and analysis. A part of that set of absolutes is that good writing lends itself particularly toward scholarly consideration, and that scholarly analysis is the end to which all good literary fiction aims. It is a symbiotic relationship. The writer writes to be read. The scholar reads to analyze. In his discussion of the tenets of liberal humanism, Peter Barry writes: “The job of criticism is to interpret the text, to mediate between it and the reader” (Barry 20). This may or may not be true. After all, how does that criticism reach the readership at large? Perhaps, in fact it is the job of criticism is to create secondary texts to supplement and expand the primary materials. At any rate, it is the job of the creative writer to supply the scholar with the texts to be analyzed. One major goal of this paper is to explore the idea that by understanding this relationship between writer and scholar, the creative writer may produce richer, more scholarly fiction, and in fact should write with this end in mind.

"A Spanish art historian uncovered the first use of modern art as a deliberate form of torture: Kandinsky and Klee, as well Buñuel and Dalí, were the inspiration behind a series of secret cells and torture centers built in Barcelona in 1938, the work of a French anarchist, Alphonse Laurenčič (a Slovene family name!), who invented a form of 'psychotechnic' torture: he created his so-called “colored cells” as a contribution to the fight against Franco’s forces. The cells were as inspired by ideas of geometric abstraction and surrealism as they were by avant-garde art theories on the psychological properties of colors. Beds were placed at a 20-degree angle, making them near-impossible to sleep on, and the floors of the 6-foot-by-3-foot cells were strewn with bricks and other geometric blocks to prevent the prisoners from walking backward and forward.The only option left to them was staring at the walls, which were curved and covered with mind-altering patterns of cubes, squares, straight lines, and spirals which utilized tricks of color, perspective, and scale to cause mental confusion and distress. Lighting effects gave the impression that the dizzying patterns on the wall were moving. Laurenčič preferred to use the color green because, according to his theory of the psychological effects of various colors, it produced melancholy and sadness."